Piauí Magazine
November 2008

Family Matters
A Father in a Foreign Land
Dorrit Harazim

A week in which the personal dramas and court trials of three families collided in Rio de Janeiro once again. At the heart of the matter, an eight year-old boy.

he most frequent question put to David Goldman is why, for four years of forced separation from his son, he never filed a suit to allow for visitation rights. “If I invoked my right of visitation, I would be implicitly accepting my son’s kidnapping,” he responds. “I took up the only legal battle that I consider conceivable: to be able to bring my son home, supported by the Hague Convention and the Supreme Court of New Jersey’s decision. All the rest—permanent custody or shared types of visitation should only be discussed once the original deviation was rectified and in the jurisdiction where our family resided.”

The umbilical cord connecting Sean to his biological father was maintained by airmailed gifts, animated greeting cards online and phone conversations that were subject to abrupt interruptions. “Whatever happens from now on, I already lost four years of my boy’s life,” said Goldman. “I will never know what it was like when he lost his first baby tooth. Or the second one. I make a great effort not to try to guess what kind of image he has of me.”

Every time that he came to Brazil to acquaint himself with the progress of the case along with Ricardo Zamariola Jr, his 28 year-old lawyer from Sao Paulo, David became anxious and discouraged. He never understood the legal entanglement of a case that seemed crystal clear to him. But after discussing legal details with his lawyer, he became familiar with the names of all of the judges involved, their decisions, and all of the details of the case. To try to reduce the emotional somersaults, he avoided traveling to Brazil alone. On the first trip, he brought his cousin. On the second, his father. On the third, he returned with his cousin. Each time—in 2005, 2006, and 2007—he went home to Tinton Falls, without Sean.

It was Bruna’s death this past August that definitively combined the dramas of the Bianchi, Goldman and Lins e Silva families. As soon as he found out his son had lost his mother, the American embarked on Delta Flight 121 on the morning of September 7th, , 2008 bringing Grandma Ellie, Sean’s paternal grandmother, whose fond relationship with her former daughter-in-law survived during troubled times. David was sure that given the disappearance of the maternal figure, this time his son would be returned to him by order of the court, without delay.

He then discovered that João Paulo Lins e Silva, Bruna’s widower, had filed suit in the Second Family Court in Rio de Janeiro asking for full custody and possession of Sean, claiming “socio-affective paternity.”

Goldman always gets upset when discussing this chapter of the story. “How is it possible,” he asks, “that a person without any blood relation to a child whose biological father is alive and well could be recognized as a ‘socio-affective father’ as the result of kidnapping? What do they want to do with my son? To give him the family name Lins e Silva and erase his original identity? It’s the most absurd of all absurdities, accepted by a judge of the law.” According to Goldman’s account, the same judge rejected his request to see his son after he lost his mother. Other sources guarantee that the denial split the mourning families.

To be so close to Sean and to find himself empty-handed yet again, David Goldman agreed to speak to reporters Uirá Machado and Cristina Luckner from Folha de S.Paulo, who wrote about the case on September 16th. In the name of secrecy of justice, the Second Family Court of Rio ordered the newspaper to abstain from publishing future stories. Ten days later, the Correio Braziliense newspaper wrote about the custody dispute in detail.

A report by Rede Record TV also caused João Paulo Lins e Silva and Bruna’s parents to file suit in court, requesting to censor the station. Claiming that the news crew had filmed the building where the Bianchi and Lins e Silva families live with Sean and baby Chiara, they presented the censorship request so that Record would abstain from producing, distributing and publishing any facts involving the minor. The prosecutor of the 37th Civil Court in Rio, on night duty, accepted the request.

It would be naive to hope that a story of an American child (Sean has dual citizenship), held in Brazil in violation of an international treaty, wouldn’t appear in the American media. Prior to agreeing to do an interview on NBC’s The Today Show-- the morning news program with the largest audience in the US—he brought his case to authorities with the civil obligation to a constituent. The only person who avoided this responsibility, he says, was the president of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Democrat Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice presidential candidate. “I couldn’t vote for an administration that includes Sarah Palin, but Biden disappointed me so much that I don’t know who I’m going to vote for anymore,” said Goldman.

The governor of New Jersey, John S. Corzine, who was still a Senator at the time Goldman contacted him, has taken steps to help. In a long letter to a diplomat of the US serving in Brazil, he emphasized that he expected more effort so that the case could be resolved under the Hague Convention. He added that since Brazil and the United States were signatories to the treaty, the two countries should consider a private dispute about an abducted child to be of the same magnitude of any other international economic or environmental matter. He concluded requesting a follow up.

The State Department, for its part, through the Office of Children’s Issues (responsible in the US for the Hague Convention application), sent an official letter to the Brazilian entity that has the same function and asked that it obtain a fast solution along with the Brazilian courts. The Democratic Congressman Frank Pallone, serving his tenth consecutive term, dispatched letters in various directions, accusing the Brazilian Central Authority of not providing David Goldman with the appropriate assistance. Simon Henshaw, at the time Consul General in Rio, also sent letters to the Federal Judge of the Federal Regional Tribunal of the Second Region, and to the minister Nancy Andrighi, of the Superior Justice Tribunal, expressing the American Embassy’s concern with the legal decisions made until then, which were ignoring the Hague Convention application. The ambassador himself, Clifford M. Sobel, allegedly used diplomatic channels to convey the view that Sean’s temporary custody obtained by João Paulo Lins e Silva violated not only the Hague Convention, but the Brazilian Civil Code as well, which states that in the absence of a parent, the automatic custody is awarded to the other parent.

On Saturday morning, October 18th, when David Goldman would finally have visitation with his son, he waited with his Brazilian lawyer and an official from the American consulate for an hour on the sidewalk, while three court officers and two plain clothes federal police officers, accompanied by two building employees, went to look for the boy. After a lengthy delay, said David, the trio decided to wait inside a van with tinted windows until Sean was brought to them . They waited for three hours—for nothing.

Sean wasn’t found. João Paulo Lins e Silva wasn’t, either. According to the court officers, the only people in the apartment were baby Chiara, Bruna’s parents and brother, and a nanny. David returned alone to his hotel on Atlantica Avenue, where he thought he would be spending the afternoon with his son.

Previous   1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  Next

Copyright © 2008 Piauí Magazine - Brazil, Reprinted with permission

Top of page